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Blue Cheese, Pepper, Steak & Mushroom Focaccia

Wednesday, August 12, 2009

I'm catching up on my Bread Baker's Apprentice Challenge with Peter Reinhart's recipe for Focaccia (which you can get from his book below, starting on page 159-167). There are 2 versions of Focaccia in his book - standard and poolish (which involves a starter). For this challenge I went with the standard recipe. This time around, I didn't make individual portions or mini focaccia, but I do plan on it in the future!

The standard recipe involves a dough made with flour, yeast, salt, sugar, olive oil and water. Once it's combined into a sticky dough, it's formed into a rectangle, stretched and folded upon itself. This recipe definitely requires patience since you must stretch and fold it upon itself 3 times every 30 minutes.

Once it's had it's third fold over, the dough is left to rest for an hour. The dough gets a nice, liberal coating of herb oil (and I stress liberal!) before it's wrapped and chilled overnight.

I could have left the focaccia as is and baked it once it came up to room temperature, but I wanted to turn this dough into a pizza. For toppings, I used a mixture of caramelized cremini mushrooms, onion, red bell pepper, crumbled blue cheese and seasoned skirt steak. It's baked in a 500 degree oven until beautifully browned.

This recipe was a lot of fun to make simply because you really got your hands in the dough. (I especially enjoyed dimpling the focaccia.) I liked how rustic it was and versatile enough to customize it with whatever toppings you want.

Hmmm, you had me at blue cheese. I love these flavor combos, your foccacia bread looks great. Bread is such a challenge for me...I'll wait until the season changes a bit before I attempt this one. I'm still bookmarking it!!!